1“Essai sur les Livres dans l’AntiquitÉ.”

2For a very interesting article on this subject, see Cornhill Magazine, vol. ix.

3Carnan is said, by Mr. Knight, to have been so frequently prosecuted that he invariably kept a clean shirt in his pocket, that he might lessen the inconvenience of being carried off unexpectedly to Newgate.

4D’Urfey was a music-master.

5This anecdote is often incorrectly related of Wilkes and the Essay on Woman.

6The Daily Post, Feb. 13, 1728.

7A most interesting and voluminous collection of “notes” in reference to Curll was contributed to “Notes and Queries” (2nd series, vols. ii., iii., and x.) by M.N.S. Many of our facts in relation to him have been taken from that source, and for a far fuller account, in the rough material, we refer the reader thither.

8West says he sat next Lackington at a sale when he spent upwards of £12,000 in an afternoon.

9Bookseller, June, 1865.

10As we shall have no other opportunity of referring to the third in rank of the leading quarterlies, we must, perforce, compress its history in a foot-note. The Westminster Review was started more than fifty years ago, by Jeremy Bentham, who was succeeded in editorship by Sir John Browning, in conjunction with General Perronet Thompson, whose labours in the cause of radical reform gave him considerable notoriety at the time. They made way for the accomplished statesman Sir William Molesworth, the editor of Hobbes. A profounder thinker still, Mr. John Stuart Mill, followed. Most of his philosophical essays appeared in its pages, at a time when Grote and Mr. Carlyle were both contributing. For more than twenty years now the Review has been in the hands of Dr. Chapman, who, beginning life as a bookseller in Newgate Street, was the first English publisher to recognise the value of Emerson’s writings. Under Dr. Chapman, what is now the great feature—the Quarterly Summary of Contemporary Literature—was introduced. The Review has lately attracted much attention by the bold manner in which the “Social Evil” and the “Contagious Diseases Acts” have been discussed in its columns, and these articles are generally attributed to the able pen of the editor himself.

11

Many of these may be found in the volume of Miscellanies published by Longmans. It has been denied that No. XI. is by Macaulay at all.

12For a further account of these extraordinary sales, see Allibone’s Dictionary of English Literature, vol. ii., from which many of the above facts have been drawn.

13Among the sufferers by this failure was the family of Robert Watt, M.D., author of “Bibliotheca Britannica,” for which £2000 had been given in bills, all of which were dishonoured. He was a ploughboy until his seventeenth year, wrote many medical treatises, and occupied his concluding years with a work precious and indispensable to every student. The whole plan of the “Bibliotheca” is new, and few compilations of similar magnitude and variety ever presented, in a first edition, a more complete design and execution.

14Quarterly Review, vol. lxx.

15Given to Dallas.

16Published by James Power, music seller.

17Written at Geneva, and published by John Hunt, London.

18This sketch was written before the publication of Mr. W. Chambers’s life of his brother, but has been revised in accordance with that interesting memoir.

19Mr. Long has deposited in the Public Library at Brighton his private copy of the “EncyclopÆdia,” interleaved with the names of the contributors, and other interesting information as to the progress of the work.

20Mr. G.W.M. Reynolds, of the “Mysteries of London” notoriety, commenced life also as a temperance lecturer, and was at one time editor of the Teetotaller Newspaper.

21Lockhart, in his article in the Quarterly, says that Hook’s diary shows a clear profit of £2000 on the first series. This must be incorrect.

22The term Conger is ingeniously said to be derived from the eel, meaning that the association, collectively, would swallow all smaller fry.

23Aldine Magazine, p. 50.

24It was from the intricacy of thought of some few of the poems of the “Christian Year,” that Sydney Smith christened it by the name of “The Sunday Puzzle.”

25For the facts in the earlier portion of this memoir we are indebted to an interesting obituary notice in the Bookseller.

26For a very interesting bibliographical account of Mr. Tennyson’s works, showing the various changes which the poems have undergone, see “Tennysoniana,” by R.H. Shepherd (1856).

27For a full account of this interesting and successful bookseller see “Life of Alderman Kelly,” by the Rev. R.C. Fell (1856).

28Tegg left a manuscript autobiography, which was published twenty years after his death, in the City Press; to this interesting memorial we are indebted for the facts in our present narrative.

29This “Petition” was first printed in the Examiner, 7th April, 1839, and afterwards republished.

30The Bookseller, June, 1864.

31The Bookseller, 1861.

32The above account is abridged from the Bookseller of November, 1869.

33To a timely notice in a recent number of the Bookseller we are indebted for the main facts in Duffy’s life.